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Fiction

Death

By Alonso Sanchez Baute
Translated from Spanish by George Henson
Alonso Sanchez Baute's narrator is sideswiped by the news of Gianni Versace's death.

The day Gianni was killed I’d just unpacked from a trip to Cartagena, where I’d gone to tan my beautiful body because I look flawless tanned. So I called my pilot friend who works for ACES to ask when he was flying to Cartagena next, to see if he could get me on a flight for free, and he—such a charming man and a beefy daddy—called his friends at the airline right then and got me tickets, and I was able to go to Cartagena for a weekend and stay with a friend from my hometown who has a house there, because the truth is I don’t have a dollar to take a trip across the street, unless, by some miracle, someone else pays, which is exactly what happened, because in the end I didn’t have to pay a dime.

So, anyway, the day Gianni was killed, I’d just gotten back from Cartagena, and I was getting ready to visit my friend Roberto to tell him everything I had done on the beautiful Colombian beaches so he could wallow in envy, because, like the ad says, it’s better to cause it than feel it. So I caught the first bus ejecutivo on Seventh I could find—I’d rather die than be caught on a minibus—and just as I was getting ready to sit down, walking like this, flawless, down the aisle as if I were on a catwalk at the Cartagena Hilton where the beauty queens parade in bathing suits, suddenly, bam, the earth-shattering news comes out of nowhere: Versace has just been killed on a street in South Beach. Awful: I hadn’t even been to South Beach! Imagine my shock—I couldn’t even place it, I didn’t know what they were talking about, I wasn’t able to imagine the situation, I felt stupid, ignorant, uncultured. And to top it off, the other passengers on the bus didn’t even blink. There I was, walking down the aisle, looking at the faces of the people who were traveling with me on the bus—nothing, everyone, as if nothing had happened, continued looking out the window, totally indifferent, either talking or laughing. And I asked myself: My Dragness, what kind of country is this where no one is disturbed by such news, where no one blinks at the death of such a god? That’s why there’s social injustice—I thought at the time—that’s why there’s vandalism, that’s why our streets aren’t safe: because of the lack of solidarity, the lack of brotherly love. That’s when I decided that it was because of so many years of violence, I guess, that we’d lost that thing they call a social conscience in Colombia.

I, on the other hand, was in shock, and I immediately thought about Donatella, and Santos, and the magnificent house that belonged to Antonio D’amico, Gianni’s lifelong husband, and I wondered who would inherit that fortune and end up with the store on Fifth Avenue, and the mansion in South Beach, and all the shirts, and the spectacular underwear that I could never buy because they cost fifty dollars a pair. I think I must have fainted, because I fell into the first open seat, bam, as if I’d suddenly run into life, and I cried, and cried, and cried, not just a river like in the song by Maná, but an entire Pacific Ocean, and the Atlantic, and, of course, the Mediterranean Sea—because if a queen cries an entire sea, she has to cry the Mediterranean or, at least, the Aegean, which is as clean and as pretty and as blue and bathes those fabulous beaches on Paradise and Super Paradise in Mykonos and where, everyone who’s seen them says, the most beautiful papitos in the universe sunbathe naked.

Thinking about Gianni’s death I feel like a Molotov cocktail of negative emotions. The same thing always happens to me when I think about death, and it really bums me out because I get really sad, and sadness pisses me off and, to top it off, it makes me feel melancholy, and then I start obsessing, which is a bitch because it doesn’t lead to anything positive, and you end up a bigger drama queen than my superhot friend Simón. But today I’ve been feeling all, like, dejamestá, which is a word we use where I come from when you don’t want to admit that you’re depressed, because depression is like death: a taboo subject. No one likes to talk about death and even less read about it, so that you can avoid realizing that someday all this happiness is going to end. That’s why I’d understand if someone wants me to stop spilling my guts here, even though, truthfully, I can’t write about this clatter of happiness when I’m sad, like today, in spite of the fact that my life is a cacophony and my heart is bursting with happiness. That’s why I promise, solemnly, I’m going to take a break from being happy just today, in order to talk about things that no one likes to hear, and if any other time—which I don’t think will happen—I feel depressed, I’ll resist telling you about it because, like everyone else, I believe you have to shoo the sadness, and when you start to cry, it’s best to say, ¡olé!, like a matador, and wipe the tears away, as soon as you can, with the most elegant of verónicas.

I’ve learned over time to appreciate and enjoy my homosexuality. But I confess it wasn’t easy, and it isn’t easy now. But when you accept and understand that being this way isn’t our fault, or that it’s not an invention of the devil who possessed our bodies to do evil, much less the sin that the beatas, the holier-than-thou señoras, talk about at five-o’clock mass. And we don’t have to strike our chests, or whip ourselves, or even cry every night when we’re in bed under the covers, just for being different from the rest of humanity. To be honest, though, what makes us different from straight men isn’t that we go to bed with men and they don’t. They do. What makes us different is that we have the balls to live the life we want, breaking the rules imposed by society, confronting the law that say that you’ve got to marry a woman and have children and raise them and send them to school and earn enough to give them an allowance, and then demand that they marry the woman that we, their parents, approve of, and allow them to move away eventually to live far from home so, when we’re fifty years old, they can do all the things that we wanted to do.

The problem isn’t just that our countries are machista, like a lot of people think, but rather our societies operate under ambiguous standards that prefer that people be hypocrites and do whatever they want as long as they don’t do it in public. That’s not only how we latinos are but also the gringos, who get all bent out of shape just because their president allowed Paula Jones to give him a blow job, and Monica Lengüinsky, and who knows how many others, as if, with all the problems in the world, it mattered whether Bill Clinton had a mole on his dick or whether it was crooked or not, and whether he should resign and go to jail for a long time because of it. The Danes, on the other hand, don’t allow themselves to be influenced by such religious nonsense. They call a spade a spade. And no one can say that they don’t have morals, because morals, after all, are like assholes, everyone has one and they usually stink. Take the French, on the other hand, who are anything but Manichean and, still, lead happy lives, and that’s how we saw them in ¡Hola! the day of Mitterand’s funeral, wife and mistress side-by-side, because that’s how it should be, that’s how you should live: head-on, without anyone telling you what to do, without bowing to societal norms that no one understands, or knows where they came from, because I’m sure that if you ask anyone on the street why being homosexual is bad, no one, I guarantee, no one will give an intelligent answer. In fact, everyone thinks that you should stay away from gays just because society says so, without so much as thinking about it, without daring to ask what the hell they find so awful about it, without even knowing what about homosexuality is a “sin.” 

The fact is, we humans are more herdlike than sheep: so eager to take the easy way out that we live borrowed lives, incapable of straying from predesigned models. We’re as cowardly as ostriches, always with our heads stuck in the sand so we don’t have to face the realities of life. That’s why someday I’ll live in France, or Holland, or Denmark, or a country where people don’t allow petty gossip to stop them, and dare to do the only intelligent thing that can be done in this fucking world we were born in: be happy.

But you can’t be happy when one morning when you least expect it, bam, you find out that someone is killing your heroes; when sick minds are capable of murdering even Gianni, someone who not only didn’t harm anyone but also sewed so many fabulous dresses, all of them spectacular and rococo, in bright colors and with medusae incrusted everywhere. Hamlet said it in the movie I rented at Blockbuster the other day, the one with Mel Gibson, when he found out that his uncle had killed his dad, the king, he said something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or something like that, but not just in Denmark, also in Bogotá, and in Lima, and in Los Angeles, and in Taipei, and in Shanghai, and in New York, and in Miami, where some queen who was repressed by society goes out on the street with a gun one day and shoots Versace in the head. Now that I think about it, who wouldn’t? With so many cobwebs in our head—so many cockroaches is more like it, the only thing that survived the atomic bomb that the gringos dropped over Hiroshima, and continue to be the only thing capable of surviving in the cobwebs that we humans weave in our minds. And we don’t even know for sure if Cunanan, the guy who they say murdered Versace, was for sure a repressed gay. They said the same thing about Yolanda Saldívar, who allegedly killed Selena: that she was a lesbian. But who can say whether or not these murderers were homosexuals or whether they’re artifices that society uses to convince us that being gay is so bad that we’re even capable of killing our own.

We live in a world without heroes. The slogan is finish off whoever is able to excel, just like my enemies at La Caja de Pandora have tried to finish me off, saying that I am a poisonous harpy, as if harpies were poisonous. Snakes are poisonous, some frogs, fire ants, and a whole lot of other animals, but not harpies. Of course they do it as a defense mechanism, to maintain their species on earth, just like they taught us in elementary school about that Darwin guy, but not Darwin Jiménez, Enrique’s cousin, my friend from the bookstores, but the other Darwin, the one who said all that stuff about the survival of the species. Unlike we humans who kill for pleasure, out of envy, because we allow ourselves to be manipulated by social repression, all to make money that we’ll never be able to take with us to hell, because not even the Greeks were able to take with them those coins that people say they used to put on their foreheads when they died, supposedly to pay Charon for transporting them across the river Styx. When you’re dead, you’re dead, period.

It’s funny but now that I think about it, we homosexuals grow accustomed to the loss of our loved ones from an early age. The first person we lose, of course, is ourselves: it’s the beginning of that great pain that we face in our lives, the chaos of knowing who we are, this way: in the plural, or that we’re not what everyone else wants us to be, the feeling of that monster that grows inside us that we can’t defeat, without knowing where it comes from, how it’s born, why. No one who hasn’t struggled with something that everyone judges to be evil can understand this fact clearly.

Then we lose our parents, who are usually the last to accept the idea of having a queer son. Some simply feel guilty for having given birth to such a diabolical reprobate, who should remain forever in the depths of Tartarus, or for having raised us wrong and spoiled us from childhood, as if that were the cause of homosexuality. Others face deep fears, of being the intermediaries of Satan and things like that, of having given birth to a shameful and abominable being, who rejects his family and rebels against God. And those parents who don’t think it’s such a bad thing are quick to invent problems. Take, for example, the case of my friend Gabriel, who’s dealing with some maternal drama: his family has passed on, from generation to generation, a ring that once belonged to the first of their descendants to land in this country, back in the times when Colombia was a colony. And now, because Gabriel is not only gay but, to top it off, the only son, no one will inherit the ring, which is going to be kept in a vault in saecula saeculorum, and no one will ever know that it exists, which is terrible because the mother (who’s already getting old) says that she’s more than fifty years old and can’t have another son to inherit the ring that belonged to her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. That’s why, whenever I run into Gabriel I ask about his mother and he, all distressed by the centuries-old misfortune, always says the same thing: “She’s there, still unsure how she’s going to solve the problem with the ring.” Yes, I definitely know of many parents who would prefer to hide their gay children at the bottom of the earth, like Uranus, and not allow them to see the light of day ever again, so they don’t have to feel inferior to the rest of humanity: better dead than queer, they exclaim to God thanklessly.

Little by little, they’re all leaving our side. It’s an exception if one stays. Yes, I know that being gay is in style now and people call us and invite us over and say “Come to the party I’m giving at my apartment this Friday, but come in drag because people love it,” and you go, knowing that they’re inviting you to be the clown in charge of entertainment, but you go because, after all, it’s so-and-so’s party and How can we miss it when all her parties are always in A!ós and Cromos. But those people aren’t your friends, real real friends, who’ll wash and iron your clothes, the kind that you can tell all your problems and misfortunes and heartaches to and “Listen, so-and-so left me for someone else and I don’t know what I’m going to do now alone for the rest of my life.”

And that means there are two tragedies in one: sometimes, because the love of your life has left you; other times, because you can’t share it with anyone. And I wonder: what the hell is a tragedy good for if you can’t talk about it? But no, we have to suffer alone, since heteros believe that being gay is a punishment, we have to pay a price. Besides, that’s why for them it’s not just a scandal that we’re gay but, even worse, that we might have a partner. That’s the worst thing for them—“You mean you’re in love with another man and it’s mutual?” And it bothers them that we have someone to be with, to support us, and to share our problems with, and all those little love things.

No, sirs: it isn’t easy being gay, not in the least. I wish a straight guy had the courage to live all this . . . but they’re all cowards, “the strong sex.” They prefer to hide behind their wives’ skirt, or in their mommies’ lap, or behind their children, while going off on us the whole time, as if we were given a choice, as if someone had asked us when we were born: “Say, do you want to be gay?”

From Al diablo la maldita primavera. © Alonso Sánchez Baute. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 by George Henson. All rights reserved. 

English Spanish (Original)

The day Gianni was killed I’d just unpacked from a trip to Cartagena, where I’d gone to tan my beautiful body because I look flawless tanned. So I called my pilot friend who works for ACES to ask when he was flying to Cartagena next, to see if he could get me on a flight for free, and he—such a charming man and a beefy daddy—called his friends at the airline right then and got me tickets, and I was able to go to Cartagena for a weekend and stay with a friend from my hometown who has a house there, because the truth is I don’t have a dollar to take a trip across the street, unless, by some miracle, someone else pays, which is exactly what happened, because in the end I didn’t have to pay a dime.

So, anyway, the day Gianni was killed, I’d just gotten back from Cartagena, and I was getting ready to visit my friend Roberto to tell him everything I had done on the beautiful Colombian beaches so he could wallow in envy, because, like the ad says, it’s better to cause it than feel it. So I caught the first bus ejecutivo on Seventh I could find—I’d rather die than be caught on a minibus—and just as I was getting ready to sit down, walking like this, flawless, down the aisle as if I were on a catwalk at the Cartagena Hilton where the beauty queens parade in bathing suits, suddenly, bam, the earth-shattering news comes out of nowhere: Versace has just been killed on a street in South Beach. Awful: I hadn’t even been to South Beach! Imagine my shock—I couldn’t even place it, I didn’t know what they were talking about, I wasn’t able to imagine the situation, I felt stupid, ignorant, uncultured. And to top it off, the other passengers on the bus didn’t even blink. There I was, walking down the aisle, looking at the faces of the people who were traveling with me on the bus—nothing, everyone, as if nothing had happened, continued looking out the window, totally indifferent, either talking or laughing. And I asked myself: My Dragness, what kind of country is this where no one is disturbed by such news, where no one blinks at the death of such a god? That’s why there’s social injustice—I thought at the time—that’s why there’s vandalism, that’s why our streets aren’t safe: because of the lack of solidarity, the lack of brotherly love. That’s when I decided that it was because of so many years of violence, I guess, that we’d lost that thing they call a social conscience in Colombia.

I, on the other hand, was in shock, and I immediately thought about Donatella, and Santos, and the magnificent house that belonged to Antonio D’amico, Gianni’s lifelong husband, and I wondered who would inherit that fortune and end up with the store on Fifth Avenue, and the mansion in South Beach, and all the shirts, and the spectacular underwear that I could never buy because they cost fifty dollars a pair. I think I must have fainted, because I fell into the first open seat, bam, as if I’d suddenly run into life, and I cried, and cried, and cried, not just a river like in the song by Maná, but an entire Pacific Ocean, and the Atlantic, and, of course, the Mediterranean Sea—because if a queen cries an entire sea, she has to cry the Mediterranean or, at least, the Aegean, which is as clean and as pretty and as blue and bathes those fabulous beaches on Paradise and Super Paradise in Mykonos and where, everyone who’s seen them says, the most beautiful papitos in the universe sunbathe naked.

Thinking about Gianni’s death I feel like a Molotov cocktail of negative emotions. The same thing always happens to me when I think about death, and it really bums me out because I get really sad, and sadness pisses me off and, to top it off, it makes me feel melancholy, and then I start obsessing, which is a bitch because it doesn’t lead to anything positive, and you end up a bigger drama queen than my superhot friend Simón. But today I’ve been feeling all, like, dejamestá, which is a word we use where I come from when you don’t want to admit that you’re depressed, because depression is like death: a taboo subject. No one likes to talk about death and even less read about it, so that you can avoid realizing that someday all this happiness is going to end. That’s why I’d understand if someone wants me to stop spilling my guts here, even though, truthfully, I can’t write about this clatter of happiness when I’m sad, like today, in spite of the fact that my life is a cacophony and my heart is bursting with happiness. That’s why I promise, solemnly, I’m going to take a break from being happy just today, in order to talk about things that no one likes to hear, and if any other time—which I don’t think will happen—I feel depressed, I’ll resist telling you about it because, like everyone else, I believe you have to shoo the sadness, and when you start to cry, it’s best to say, ¡olé!, like a matador, and wipe the tears away, as soon as you can, with the most elegant of verónicas.

I’ve learned over time to appreciate and enjoy my homosexuality. But I confess it wasn’t easy, and it isn’t easy now. But when you accept and understand that being this way isn’t our fault, or that it’s not an invention of the devil who possessed our bodies to do evil, much less the sin that the beatas, the holier-than-thou señoras, talk about at five-o’clock mass. And we don’t have to strike our chests, or whip ourselves, or even cry every night when we’re in bed under the covers, just for being different from the rest of humanity. To be honest, though, what makes us different from straight men isn’t that we go to bed with men and they don’t. They do. What makes us different is that we have the balls to live the life we want, breaking the rules imposed by society, confronting the law that say that you’ve got to marry a woman and have children and raise them and send them to school and earn enough to give them an allowance, and then demand that they marry the woman that we, their parents, approve of, and allow them to move away eventually to live far from home so, when we’re fifty years old, they can do all the things that we wanted to do.

The problem isn’t just that our countries are machista, like a lot of people think, but rather our societies operate under ambiguous standards that prefer that people be hypocrites and do whatever they want as long as they don’t do it in public. That’s not only how we latinos are but also the gringos, who get all bent out of shape just because their president allowed Paula Jones to give him a blow job, and Monica Lengüinsky, and who knows how many others, as if, with all the problems in the world, it mattered whether Bill Clinton had a mole on his dick or whether it was crooked or not, and whether he should resign and go to jail for a long time because of it. The Danes, on the other hand, don’t allow themselves to be influenced by such religious nonsense. They call a spade a spade. And no one can say that they don’t have morals, because morals, after all, are like assholes, everyone has one and they usually stink. Take the French, on the other hand, who are anything but Manichean and, still, lead happy lives, and that’s how we saw them in ¡Hola! the day of Mitterand’s funeral, wife and mistress side-by-side, because that’s how it should be, that’s how you should live: head-on, without anyone telling you what to do, without bowing to societal norms that no one understands, or knows where they came from, because I’m sure that if you ask anyone on the street why being homosexual is bad, no one, I guarantee, no one will give an intelligent answer. In fact, everyone thinks that you should stay away from gays just because society says so, without so much as thinking about it, without daring to ask what the hell they find so awful about it, without even knowing what about homosexuality is a “sin.” 

The fact is, we humans are more herdlike than sheep: so eager to take the easy way out that we live borrowed lives, incapable of straying from predesigned models. We’re as cowardly as ostriches, always with our heads stuck in the sand so we don’t have to face the realities of life. That’s why someday I’ll live in France, or Holland, or Denmark, or a country where people don’t allow petty gossip to stop them, and dare to do the only intelligent thing that can be done in this fucking world we were born in: be happy.

But you can’t be happy when one morning when you least expect it, bam, you find out that someone is killing your heroes; when sick minds are capable of murdering even Gianni, someone who not only didn’t harm anyone but also sewed so many fabulous dresses, all of them spectacular and rococo, in bright colors and with medusae incrusted everywhere. Hamlet said it in the movie I rented at Blockbuster the other day, the one with Mel Gibson, when he found out that his uncle had killed his dad, the king, he said something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or something like that, but not just in Denmark, also in Bogotá, and in Lima, and in Los Angeles, and in Taipei, and in Shanghai, and in New York, and in Miami, where some queen who was repressed by society goes out on the street with a gun one day and shoots Versace in the head. Now that I think about it, who wouldn’t? With so many cobwebs in our head—so many cockroaches is more like it, the only thing that survived the atomic bomb that the gringos dropped over Hiroshima, and continue to be the only thing capable of surviving in the cobwebs that we humans weave in our minds. And we don’t even know for sure if Cunanan, the guy who they say murdered Versace, was for sure a repressed gay. They said the same thing about Yolanda Saldívar, who allegedly killed Selena: that she was a lesbian. But who can say whether or not these murderers were homosexuals or whether they’re artifices that society uses to convince us that being gay is so bad that we’re even capable of killing our own.

We live in a world without heroes. The slogan is finish off whoever is able to excel, just like my enemies at La Caja de Pandora have tried to finish me off, saying that I am a poisonous harpy, as if harpies were poisonous. Snakes are poisonous, some frogs, fire ants, and a whole lot of other animals, but not harpies. Of course they do it as a defense mechanism, to maintain their species on earth, just like they taught us in elementary school about that Darwin guy, but not Darwin Jiménez, Enrique’s cousin, my friend from the bookstores, but the other Darwin, the one who said all that stuff about the survival of the species. Unlike we humans who kill for pleasure, out of envy, because we allow ourselves to be manipulated by social repression, all to make money that we’ll never be able to take with us to hell, because not even the Greeks were able to take with them those coins that people say they used to put on their foreheads when they died, supposedly to pay Charon for transporting them across the river Styx. When you’re dead, you’re dead, period.

It’s funny but now that I think about it, we homosexuals grow accustomed to the loss of our loved ones from an early age. The first person we lose, of course, is ourselves: it’s the beginning of that great pain that we face in our lives, the chaos of knowing who we are, this way: in the plural, or that we’re not what everyone else wants us to be, the feeling of that monster that grows inside us that we can’t defeat, without knowing where it comes from, how it’s born, why. No one who hasn’t struggled with something that everyone judges to be evil can understand this fact clearly.

Then we lose our parents, who are usually the last to accept the idea of having a queer son. Some simply feel guilty for having given birth to such a diabolical reprobate, who should remain forever in the depths of Tartarus, or for having raised us wrong and spoiled us from childhood, as if that were the cause of homosexuality. Others face deep fears, of being the intermediaries of Satan and things like that, of having given birth to a shameful and abominable being, who rejects his family and rebels against God. And those parents who don’t think it’s such a bad thing are quick to invent problems. Take, for example, the case of my friend Gabriel, who’s dealing with some maternal drama: his family has passed on, from generation to generation, a ring that once belonged to the first of their descendants to land in this country, back in the times when Colombia was a colony. And now, because Gabriel is not only gay but, to top it off, the only son, no one will inherit the ring, which is going to be kept in a vault in saecula saeculorum, and no one will ever know that it exists, which is terrible because the mother (who’s already getting old) says that she’s more than fifty years old and can’t have another son to inherit the ring that belonged to her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. That’s why, whenever I run into Gabriel I ask about his mother and he, all distressed by the centuries-old misfortune, always says the same thing: “She’s there, still unsure how she’s going to solve the problem with the ring.” Yes, I definitely know of many parents who would prefer to hide their gay children at the bottom of the earth, like Uranus, and not allow them to see the light of day ever again, so they don’t have to feel inferior to the rest of humanity: better dead than queer, they exclaim to God thanklessly.

Little by little, they’re all leaving our side. It’s an exception if one stays. Yes, I know that being gay is in style now and people call us and invite us over and say “Come to the party I’m giving at my apartment this Friday, but come in drag because people love it,” and you go, knowing that they’re inviting you to be the clown in charge of entertainment, but you go because, after all, it’s so-and-so’s party and How can we miss it when all her parties are always in A!ós and Cromos. But those people aren’t your friends, real real friends, who’ll wash and iron your clothes, the kind that you can tell all your problems and misfortunes and heartaches to and “Listen, so-and-so left me for someone else and I don’t know what I’m going to do now alone for the rest of my life.”

And that means there are two tragedies in one: sometimes, because the love of your life has left you; other times, because you can’t share it with anyone. And I wonder: what the hell is a tragedy good for if you can’t talk about it? But no, we have to suffer alone, since heteros believe that being gay is a punishment, we have to pay a price. Besides, that’s why for them it’s not just a scandal that we’re gay but, even worse, that we might have a partner. That’s the worst thing for them—“You mean you’re in love with another man and it’s mutual?” And it bothers them that we have someone to be with, to support us, and to share our problems with, and all those little love things.

No, sirs: it isn’t easy being gay, not in the least. I wish a straight guy had the courage to live all this . . . but they’re all cowards, “the strong sex.” They prefer to hide behind their wives’ skirt, or in their mommies’ lap, or behind their children, while going off on us the whole time, as if we were given a choice, as if someone had asked us when we were born: “Say, do you want to be gay?”

Muerte

El día que mataron a Gianni recién había desempacado de un viaje a Cartagena, adonde fui a broncear mi bello cuerpo porque yo, bronceada, me veo divino. Por eso llamé a mi amiguito que trabaja en ACES  a preguntarle cuándo estaba de turno para pilotear a Cartagena, cosa que pudiese meterme gratis al avión, y él, que es un encanto de hombre y un papito trozudo, ahí mismito llamó a sus compañeros en  la aerolínea  y me levantó los tiquetes, y pude irme de fin de semana a Cartagena a casa de un paisanito que tiene casa allá, porque yo, la verdad, no tengo un peso para viajar por ahora ni a Melgar, a menos, pero por Dios, que me regalen el viaje, como efectivamente sucedió porque a la final no pagué absolutamente nada.

Pues bien, el día que mataron a Gianni, yo acababa de llegar de Cartagena y me disponía a visitar a mi amigo Roberto para contarle todo cuanto hice en esas bellas playas colombianas y que se revolcara con toda la envidia del mundo, que, como dice la propaganda, es mejor producirla que sentirla. De manera que tomé el primer bus ejecutivo que pasó por la Séptima -porque en buseta, ¡jamás!-, y me disponía a sentarme, caminando así, regia por ese pasillo donde me sentía como en las pasarelas del hotel Hilton de Cartagena cuando desfilan las reinas en traje de baño, cuando de repente, ¡suaz!, la noticia, así de golpe, como para causar conmoción mundial: acababan de matar a Versace en una calle de South Beach. Horror: ¡Yo sin conocer South Beach! Imagínense la catástrofe: no podía ubicar el lugar, no sabía de qué hablaban, no se me ocurría imaginar la situación. Me sentí ignorante, bruta, inculta. Y para colmo, la gente que iba en el ejecutivo ni se inmutó. Yo, que continuaba de pie en el pasillo, veía los rostros de las personas que viajaban en ese medio de transporte y nada, la gente como si nada, seguían indiferentes mirando por la ventana, o hablando, o riéndose. Y yo me pregunté: My Dragness, ¿qué país es este donde nadie se conmueve con semejante noticia, donde nadie se inmuta por la muerte de semejante dios?  Por eso es que hay injusticia socia, –reflexioné en ese momento– por eso es que hay vandalismo, por eso la inseguridad en nuestras calles: por la falta de solidaridad, por la falta de amor al prójimo. Ahí fue cuando me convencí de que en Colombia, por tantos años de violencia, me imagino, ya perdimos la vaina esa que llaman conciencia social.

Yo, en cambio, quedé exánime, y enseguida pensé en  Donatella, y en  Santos, y en la cosota divina  de Antonio D´amico, el marido de toda la vida de Gianni, y me pregunté quién heredaría toda esa fortuna y se quedaría con el almacén de la Quinta Avenida, y con la mansión de South Beach, y con las camisas, y con los calzoncillos espectaculares que jamás podré comprar porque cada uno cuesta como 50 dolaretes. Creo, incluso, que me desmayé porque caí en la primera silla disponible así, ¡suaz!, como si me hubiera tropezado con la vida, y lloré y lloré y lloré, y no todo un río, como en la canción de Maná, sino todo el océano Pacífico, y el Atlántico, y, por supuesto, el mar Mediterráneo -porque si una llora todo un mar tiene que llorar el mar Mediterráneo o, cuando menos, el mar Egeo, que es tan limpio y tan lindo, y tan azul, y que baña esas playas tan divinas de Paradise y Superparadise que quedan en Mykonos y todo el mundo que las ha conocido cuenta que los papitos más divinos del universo se broncean, desnuditos, en ellas-.

Al recordar la muerte de Gianni. Siempre me pasa lo mismo cuando pienso en la muerte, y me parece megajarto porque me pone tristísimo, y a mí la tristeza me da rabia y, para colmos, me da la melancolía, y me llega  la pensadera, y qué jartera la pensadera porque eso no conduce a nada positivo, y uno termina mas empeliculado que el triplegatico de mi amigo Simón. Pero hoy he estado todo el día  así, con dejamestá, que es una palabra que se inventaron en mi tierra para no admitir la depresión, porque la depresión es como la muerte: tema tabú. A nadie le gusta hablar de la muerte, y menos leer sobre ella para evitar pensar que algún día toda esta dicha se va a acabar. Por eso entiendo si alguien  quiere  que acabe mi carreta acá, aunque, la verdad,  yo no puedo escribir sobre el zaperoco de la alegría cuando estoy triste, como hoy, a pesar de saber que mi vida toda es una algarabía y que mi corazón está pletórico de contento. Por eso prometo, muy solemnemente, que tan sólo hoy le voy a dar un break a la felicidad para hablar de cosas que a nadie le gusta oír, y si en alguna otra ocasión –que no creo suceda- me siento deprimido, preferiré abstenerme de contar historia alguna porque yo opino lo mismo que los demás, que la tristeza hay que zapearla, y  cuando una lágrima pretenda asomarse es mejor decirle ¡olé! y hacerle el quite lo más pronto que se pueda  con la mas elegante de las verónicas.

Yo, con el tiempo, he aprendido a disfrutar y a gozarme la homosexualidad. Pero confieso que no fue fácil, y ahora tampoco es que lo sea, sólo que cuando se acepta y entiende que no es culpa nuestra ser así, ni que es un invento del diablo que se metió en nuestros cuerpos para hacer el mal, y mucho menos el pecado del que hablan las beatas en misa de cinco, ni que hay que darse golpes en el pecho, ni latigarse, ni siquiera llorar cada noche cuando estamos en nuestras camas bajo las cobijas, tan sólo por ser diferentes al resto de la humanidad. Que tampoco es que sea muy diferente, pues, para ser sinceros, lo que nos diferencia a los gays de los straight no es que nosotros nos acostemos con hombres y ellos no. Ellos también lo hacen. Lo que nos diferencia, repito, es que nosotros tenemos la corajudez de vivir como nos da la gana, rompiendo todos los esquemas impuestos por la “sociedad”, enfrenta[ndo] todos los paradigmas que dicen que uno se debe casar con una mujer, y tener hijos, y criarlos, y mandarlos al colegio, y producir para darles su mesada mensualmente, y obligarlos a casarse con la mujer que a nosotros, sus padres, nos parezca conveniente, y dejarlos ir un buen día a que vivan lejos de casa para, en ese momento, cuando uno ya tiene cincuenta años, hacer las cosas que siempre quisimos hacer.

El problema no es sólo que nuestros pueblos sean machistas, como piensan muchos, sino que nuestras sociedades manejan criterios ambiguos, y prefieren, por tanto, que  la  gente  sea  hipócrita, y haga lo que les dé la gana con tal de que no se haga público. Así somos no sólo los latinos sino también los gringos, que […] son capaces de armarle un tierrero a su presidente sólo porque se la dejó mamar de la Paula Jones, o de la Mónica Lengüinsky, o de no sé cuantas más, cuando el mundo tiene tantos problemas importantes como para averiguar si Bill Clinton tiene un lunar en la verga o si la tiene torcida o no, y si debe renunciar e irse un buen tiempo a la cárcel por eso. Los daneses, en cambio, no se dejan influenciar por esas maricadas religiosas y le dicen vino al vino y pan al pan, y nadie puede decir que no tengan moral, porque para muchos -en la práctica- moral es tan sólo una mata de moras. […] Pero, en cambio, ya ven a los franceses, que no son nada maniqueistas y, aun así, viven felices, y ahí los vimos en la ¡Hola! el día del entierro de Mitterrand acompañando a la esposa y a la amante, porque así es como debe ser, así es como se debe vivir: de frente, sin dejarse gobernar de nadie, sin cumplir órdenes sociales que nadie entiende por qué existen, ni de dónde salieron, ya que estoy seguro de que si alguien pregunta por la calle por qué es malo ser homosexual nadie, lo aseguro, nadie da una respuesta inteligente.

De hecho, todo el mundo piensa que hay que alejarse de los gays sólo porque la “sociedad” así lo dice, pero sin miramientos anteriores, sin atreverse a preguntar qué diablos hay de nefasto en eso, sin saber siquiera [en que consiste] el “pecado” de la  homosexualidad.

Y es que, los humanos somos más gregarios que las ovejas: somos tan facilistas que preferimos vivir vidas prestadas, incapaces de alejarnos de modelos prediseñados, y cobardes cual avestruces, siempre con las cabezas metidas bajo tierra con tal de no enfrentar las realidades de la vida. Por eso algún día me iré a vivir a Francia, o a Holanda, o a Dinamarca, o algún país en donde la gente no se detenga ante las minucias del qué dirán, y se atrevan a hacer lo único inteligente que puede hacerse en este puto mundo en el que nacimos: ser felices.

Pero feliz no puede ser uno cuando el día menos pensado amanece y, ¡suaz!, se entera de que están matando a sus héroes; cuando mentes perversas son capaces de matarasesinar hasta a Gianni, un tipo que no sólo no le hacía daño a nadie sino que, además, cosía unos vestiditos redivinos, espectaculares, todos rococós, con colores alegres y con la medusa incrustada en cualquier parte. Ya lo dijo el Hamlet en la película que arrendé en Blockbuster el otro día, la que protagoniza Mel Gibson: cuando supo que su tío había matado a su papá, el rey, dijo algo así como algo podrido huele en Dinamarca, pero no sólo en Dinamarca, sino también en Bogotá, y en Lima, y en Los Ángeles, y en Tai Pei, y en Shanghai, y en Nueva York, y en Miami, donde una loca se deja reprimir por la sociedad y un día cualquiera sale a la calle con un arma y va y le mete un tiro a Versace en la cabeza. Claro está, pregunto yo ahora, quién no lo haría, teniendo tantas musarañas en la cabeza, o tantas cucarachas diría mejor, que fueron las únicas que sobrevivieron a la bomba atómica que lanzaron los gringos sobre Hiroshima, y siguen siendo las únicas capaces de sobrevivir en las telarañas que nos tejemos en la mente los humanos. Claro es que tampoco es que sepamos a ciencia cierta que el tal Cunanan, el mancito que dicen que asesinó a Versace, realmente fuera un gay reprimido. Igual cosa aseguran de Yolanda Saldívar, de quien se dice mató a Selena: que era lesbiana. Pero vaya uno a saber si de veras estos asesinos son homosexuales o no son más bien artificios de la “sociedad” para convencernos de que ser gay es tan malo que hasta somos capaces de acabar con nuestro prójimo.

Mas éste, en definitiva, es un mundo sin héroes. La consigna es acabar con cualquiera que logre surgir, como han tratado de acabarme a mí mis enemigos de La Caja de Pandora, diciendo que yo soy una arpía venenosa, como si las arpías fueran venenosas. Son venenosas las víboras, algunas ranas, las hormigas quinquín, y qué sé yo qué otros animales, pero no las arpías. Claro que al menos ellos lo hacen como mecanismo de defensa, para mantener la especie sobre la tierra, como aprendimos en la primaria que decía el tal Darwin ese, pero no Darwin Jiménez, el primo de Enrique, mi amigo de los sex shops, sino otro Darwin, aquel que habló del cuento de la supervivencia de la especie. No como los humanos que matamos por placer, por envidia, por dejarnos llevar por las represiones sociales, por conseguir una plata que no nos vamos a llevar nunca al infierno, porque ni siquiera los griegos podían llevarse al más allá los óbolos esos que dicen que les ponían en la frente cuando se morían dizque para pagarle a Caronte por transportarlos a través del río Estigia. Y es que cuando uno está muerto, está muerto y punto.

Es curioso pero, ahora que lo pienso, los homosexuales nos acostumbramos a la pérdida de personas amadas desde muy temprano. A quien primero perdemos, por supuesto, es a nosotros mismos: es el inicio del ese gran dolor que enfrentamos en nuestras vidas, el desconcierto de saber quién somos, así: en plural, o que no somos lo que los demás desean, el sentimiento de ese “monstruo” grande que va creciendo en nuestro interior y que no podemos doblegar, sin saber siquiera de dónde surge, cómo nace, por qué. Nadie que no haya vivido el sinsabor de enfrentar algo a lo que todos juzgan maligno puede entender claramente este suceso.

Luego perdemos a nuestros padres, quienes, generalmente, menos aceptan la idea de tener un hijo marica. Algunos simplemente se sienten culpables por haber engendrado semejante réprobo de los demonios que más bien debería permanecer eternamente en las profundidades del Tártaro, o por habernos malcriado y consentido desde niños, como si esa fuera la causa de la homosexualidad. Otros enfrentan temores profundos: ser mediadores de Satanás y esas cosas, y haber engendrado un ser vergonzoso, abominable, que rechaza la familia y se rebela contra Dios. Y cuando la cosa no la ven tan grave, los padres siempre están prestos a inventarse problemas. Les cuento, por ejemplo, el caso de mi amiguito Gabriel que enfrenta un drama materno el macho: su familia ha heredado, de generación en generación, un anillo que fue del primer ascendiente que pisó el país, por allá por los tiempos de la colonia, y ahora, como  Gabriel no sólo es gay sino, para colmo, hijo único, el anillo no tiene sucesor y va a quedar guardado en una caja fuerte in saecula saeculorum, y nadie más sabrá de su existencia, y es terrible porque, dice la mamá, ya ella es una mujer vieja,  tiene más de cincuenta años y no puede volver a engendrar otro hijo que herede el anillo que perteneció a su tataratataratataratatarabuelo. Por eso, siempre que me encuentro con Gabriel le pregunto por su mamá y él, todo acongojado por su desgracia secular, me contesta lo mismo: “Ahí, sin saber aún como vamos a solucionar el problema del anillo”. Sí, definitivamente sé de muchos padres que preferirían hundir a sus hijos homosexuales en el fondo de la tierra, cual Urano, y no dejarlos ver la luz jamás, con tal de no sentirse inferiores al resto de la humanidad: lo prefiero muerto antes que marica, exclaman desagradecidos ante Dios.

Todos se van yendo, poquito a poco, de nuestro lado. Si queda alguno es caso extraño. Sí, ya sé que eso de ser gay está ahora de moda y la gente nos llama y nos invita y “Vení a la fiestecilla que doy en mi apartacho este viernes, pero vení en drag que a la gente eso le encanta”, y uno va, sabiendo que lo invitan como al payaso que se encarga de la diversión, pero va porque, igual, es la fiesta de fulana de tal y Cómo nos la vamos a perder si sus fiestas salen en todas las A!ós y en todas las Cromos. Pero esa gente no es amiga de uno, amiga de verdad verdad, de lavar y planchar, de esas para sentarse y contarle las cuitas y las desgracias y los sinsabores yMirá que el sutanito me dejó por otro y  no sé que voy a hacer ahora, solo, por la vida”.

Y eso significa que son dos tragedias juntas: ora, porque te abandona el amor de tu vida; ora, porque no puedes desahogarte con nadie. Y yo me pregunto: ¿Para qué diablos sirve una tragedia si no puede ser contada? Pero no, nosotros tenemos que sufrir solos, porque como los heteros creen que esto de ser gay es un castigo, se debe  pagar una culpa. Por eso, además, para ellos no sólo es escandaloso que seamos gay sino, peor aún, que tengamos una relación de pareja. Eso les parece terrible y “¿Cómo así que estás enamorado de otro hombre y eres correspondido?”, y les molesta porque tenemos con quien andar, y en quien apoyarnos, y con quien compartir las cuitas, y todas esas cositas del amor.

No, señores: ser gay no es nada fácil. Ojalá algún straight tuviera la valentía de vivir todo esto, pero son tan cobardes los hombres, “el sexo fuerte”, que prefieren refugiarse en el regazo de sus esposas, de sus mamitas, de sus hijitos, y despotricar de nosotros todo el tiempo, como si uno hubiera tenido opción en la vida y le hubieran preguntado cuando iba a nacer: “Oiga, ¿usted quiere ser gay?”

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